Memories of a Future War
by Stormbringer951
Summary: A series of short stories from the Terminator universe. Some of these are AU, some aren't. A few pairings, varying depending on my mood.
1. TechCom

**Chapter 1:** Tech-Com**  
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**Summary: **Three billion died in the nuclear exchange. Hundreds of thousands perished in the nuclear winter. Millions more were killed by the machines. For the life of him, Derek Reese can't work out why John trusts Cameron.

**Word Count:** 2004

**Rating: **PG-13 for language.

**Disclaimer: **I don't own anything from Terminator. If I did, McG wouldn't have directed that terrible fourth film.

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TECH-COM**

_"Battle not with monsters lest ye become a monster and if you gaze into the abyss the abyss gazes into you"_ - Nietzche

Sometimes, Derek can't figure out for the life of him why John trusts Cameron. To him, a hardened Tech-Com soldier, it's an abomination. Sometimes he doesn't see John Connor, the kid, but the general that he'll one day become. The future leader of the free world spends his free time talking, laughing and socialising with a terminator. The enemy. What was it they called it in the past? Fraternising with the enemy?

Letting his guard down, at the very least. That was the very thing, terminators are insidious. It's a design feature. Let your guard down for one second and **bang**! The General had told Kyle that, had explained some Japanese guy's theory called '_the uncanny valley_'. It basically stated that as robots become more human-like, people begin to view them as more and more human, up to a point. If they reach that point, suddenly that little proto-human robot is fuck-off creepy. No other words for it really, everyone gets that reaction. Derek had seen it at that tech fair; nobody who'd looked at those cutting-edge mannequins had managed to completely suppress a small shiver. Anyway, the theory continued that (hypothetically of course) one day someone would make a machine that was so close to human that people, even knowing what it was, would react to it as though it were human. Skynet had done just that.

The General had explained all this to Kyle, in greater detail. Know your enemy, he had said. Derek had agreed when his kid brother had explained it to him. He understood it all too well; he remembered all too well the moments where he'd had a terminator in his sights and his gut had clenched in the millisecond after he squeezed the trigger. A millisecond where he feared, he worried and finally prayed that it was a terminator and not a human. That it wasn't a person. And that was the _coup de grace_. Even a Resistance fighter with a decade's experience could feel one brilliant moment of hesitation and doubt when faced with a _skinjob_. Even knowing it was merely an infiltration sheath didn't help; there was still that microscopic moment of doubt. Course, they trained them for that. The instructors showed them video-capture of the consequences of hesitation. A hoary veteran had shown the fresh fighters the malformed bones of his hand, crushed in the unbreakable grip of a T-600. Derek had stood in the doorway at the back of the classroom, watching.

The soldiers of the 132nd had needed retraining too, when it came down to it. They, the all-important first attack wave - the commandos, had needed retraining and re-orientation to survive contact with an enemy that looked and moved as it were human, but wasn't. The same principles applied, of course. Never hesitate, shoot for the head or torso. If their power cells or their precious chip blew, a terminator is so much scrap metal. And if in doubt, shoot anyway. PsyOps had drummed that into them all.

Collateral damage, they said. A single dead human versus a whole dead Tech-Com insertion team? It wasn't a difficult scale to balance. It was a lesson that Derek had taken to heart, as no one else did. His squad mates mocked him for being a hard ass sonuvabitch, willing to shoot civilians on the mere suspicion that they were metal. They didn't understand the new war and what it meant for humanity. To beat the machines, they had to copy them. The Resistance needed to be as hard, as uncompromising and as drop-dead ruthless as the killing machines they were trained to retire.

The average soldier's life expectancy averaged out at about three or four years, give or take. Derek had fought for three years under the command of Major Perry, the man struggling to hold together the remains of Ashdown's resistance, before John Connor had broken the fences of Century Work Camp and brought in his new Resistance regime. He had survived through five years now of Tech-Com high-risk ops. He'd done his share of mortal sins, of war crimes (if the Geneva Convention still existed, that is). He'd shot down thirteen men who he'd been pretty sure had been terminator infiltrators in his long career. Two hadn't.

If he had too, Derek would do it again. He would probably burn in hell, and he accepted it. He wasn't a believer any more anyway. In fact, Hell had nothing on 2027's Los Angeles. When you've seen the world awash in nuclear flame, hell suddenly doesn't seem like such a bad proposition. No, Derek wasn't frightened by damnation or death. Post Judgement-Day America can pretty close to the former – and the latter was the only escape from the former.

What Derek was afraid of, the thing that kept him awake at night, was the path John was taking. The kid would have to become the man, the general. It was that or let the world go to shit. Ashdown's ridiculous open war with Skynet had ended with the machines scrapping almost all of the US military's remaining assets and with the Resistance leaderless and scattered. The Russian Resistance leader, Anton Kitsenko, was a ruthless bastard who thought nothing of throwing his fighters into a meaningless war of attrition in mainland Europe. No, it had to be John Connor. The man who had broken out of Century and rekindled hope in the jaded and tired race of man. A man who fought a successful guerilla war against Skynet, denying it vital resources and distracting it's attention from the bigger picture. Death by a thousand cuts. No, there was no one to replace General John Connor, leader of the North American Advanced Technology Command.

John had to become that man. Some days, Derek could almost see it in him, the way he moved, the way he stood. It left him hope. And fear. Fear that John might be turned from the path he was supposed to tread, the path that lead to a human victory over the machines. Without him, the War of the Future (as Sarah had dubbed it) was doomed to defeat. Derek was now responsible for the young man who amounted to humanity's messiah.

That was why Derek was frightened of Cameron. He just doesn't know where she stands. Where _it_ stands, even. It is insidious; if you stop reminding yourself of what it is even for a few minutes, you'll view it as human. A fatal error. An error John could make so easily. It appeared human, but so did the others. This one, it was different. The General had told him that this one was special. Derek hadn't understood, had almost sneered at the word, but that was what it was. It was different from the others.

And that was Bad. With a capital 'B'.

Derek can try to rationalise it away to himself, but that's no good. He can see it happening, and that has disturbing consequences. John Connor, the leader of the Resistance, feels empathy - sympathy? Love? For a terminator, no less _-_ It's horrifying; sympathy for the devil. Derek did not care for Skynet sympathisers, the so called "Grays" who worked for God-knows-what ultimate reward from the enemy of mankind. He hated seeing that emotional reaction in John, the attachment to the terminator. He could see it already, oh yes! He could see that the kid was attached to it. It was his friend, a robot companion he could order around, could hang out with, could trust completely with his life. Who wouldn't? It does his homework for him, it guards him 24/7, it follows his orders, jokes and chats with him. _Maybe it even fucks him, Reese._

Derek already had a pretty good idea that the uncanny valley which had most of an effect on young John Connor was right between Cameron's perfect tits.

No. It didn't bear thinking about. Because a terminator is a terminator. Surely even John had to understand that. But did this John truly comprehend? From what Derek had discerned, the first time this John had met a terminator, it had protected him from one of those tricky liquid-metal bastards. Was that how he viewed them? As a shield between him and harm?

For certain, this John hasn't seen what the older Connor must have seen; the horror. The horror of the future. He has never watched crowds of refugees freezing to death in a nuclear winter. He has never sat by the bedside of a comrade dying of sickness that could have been trivially cured in days at a twenty-first century hospital. _This_ John has never closed the eyes of the slaughtered inhabitants of a raided bunker and said a prayer for their souls. He has never sat waiting for the machines with nothing but a jimmy-rigged gun and a flak jacket and fought them in close quarters battle. Not yet.

That had to be it. Derek could easily believe that the kid didn't understand and comprehend the enemy, not the way that the General had. Sarah was better that way, to be honest; she would never trust a terminator further than she could push one. She'd had the hard truth drummed into her by the T-800 and his kid brother. Still, she was a disappointment too, in her way. The great Sarah Connor, revered soldier and the greatest Resistance fighter. She was soft and forgiving, too merciful to Skynet's human lackeys and too innocent.

Too _humane_, God damn the word. He's not sure if he admires her as a better person than he could be, or damns her as a naive fool. She couldn't be what he was, what he'd been. She would never be one of the soldiers who carried scratched-up Westinghouse plasma rifles, one notch for every tin can they'd scrapped. Derek never notched his rifle either, but that was just on general principle. Derek held no illusions; he wasn't that good now. Maybe never again. The months he had spent in Los Angeles had taken it's toll on his combat fitness, as had the bullet he'd taken. His speed of hand was sluggish, his reaction time had increased and he was still sick. He held no illusions, no self flattery; if it came to sudden combat, Cameron could kill him with no more effort than swatting a fly. That galled him.

Derek Reese was interrupted from his morning reverie by the entry of the cyborg in question into the room. Although visibly at ease, a body language specialist (or a terminator) could read his automatic glances towards the door and windows as the actions of a professional soldier checking the exits. The terminator probably also noticed Derek's unconscious and habitual movement of his hand towards a gun that wasn't holstered at his side.

Their eyes met. Derek Reese has no need to speak to Cameron. He knows it. He knows what the machine is, the machine with the eyes and nose and mouth and hair and body of Allison Young. She had been a young Resistance fighter, a runner in the often-fatal business of delivering messages between bunkers. The word on the grapevine was that she had been ... _involved_ with the general. Derek had seen her once on a visit to Connor's headquarters at Kansas, and she had seemed relaxed and happy in his presence - content. It repulsed him that this doppelgänger was wearing the face of Allison Young. But it was almost reassuring, this reminder of his old life. Once, he'd thought he would have loved to go back to the days of his youth. Now he had and the shock of seeing the complacency of the human civilisation was disorientating. In all this, the presence of the terminator was a stable anchor he could relate to, and hate. Because at the end of the day, in the final analysis, it was a terminator. And Derek knew all about terminators.

"I know you."

"I know you too," it replied.

The metal bitch.

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**Author's Notes:** The "Japanese guy" that Derek mentions is Masahiro Mori. His uncanny valley hypothesis is explained very roughly and more than a little incorrectly than Derek. Derek is someone from the new world, someone who holds the old world's values close to his heart while acting against them; like advocating the murder of witnesses or so on.

Thanks to my beta-readers, **T.R. Samuels** and **Thescarredman.**


	2. Weird

**Chapter 2:** Weird

**Summary: **Does it count as suicide if you shoot a version of yourself from another reality? Prompt: "_Hell, they'll probably shoot at each other at the Tech Noir, each thinking the other is a skinjob._"

**Word Count:** 2203

**Rating: **PG-13 for language, violence and metaphysics.

**Disclaimer: **I don't own anything from Terminator. If I did, I'd make the time travel mechanics actually make sense.

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**WEIRD**

_"Once confined to fantasy and science fiction, time travel is now simply an engineering problem"_ - Michio Kaku

**February 12th, 1983**

"Oh, _Jesus Christ_."

"Don't blaspheme, Mark." Vukovich's voice was quiet, but the rookie cop listened to him. People generally listened to him. _Voice of experience, I guess._

"Sorry, lieutenant."

Still, Vukovich had to agree with the uniform's sentiment. It was one of the strangest crime scenes he'd ever been called to and he'd seen plenty of them in his twenty-five years in homicide. He wondered when he'd fallen asleep and missed the memo that trendy night clubs had become vogue for gangland shootings. He could feel that it was going to be one of those nights. _A double homicide in a nightclub and a spree killer running around on the same night,_ j_ust great_. The door opened, admitting another detective.

"Ed."

"Ed," Traxler nodded his greeting. They'd worked so many cases together that a Brit had nicknamed them "The Two Eds". An old in-joke at the precinct.

"Heard the witness reports yet?"

"Only the summarized version. I've been out there, trying to keep a lid on the media circus. They're all wondering whether this has got something to do with the Phone Book Killer."

"If we're lucky, he'll be one of the two bad guys," Vukovich said. His internal voice was laughing at him; _nobody, nobody ever got that lucky_. Besides, they already had something else on the two perps.

"Ed, remember that spate of robberies that uniforms got called out to last night?"

"The ones downtown? Yeah, what about them?"

"Both of these guys are dressed in what appears to be stolen clothes. I'm guessing that if we ask around, we'll find out that those shops lost a couple of corresponding items." Clothes thieves? Huh. Vukovich wondered what had happened to make a couple of two-bit robbers upgrade to first-degree murder.

Traxler grunted. It was a lead they could chase up, but to be frank, neither of them saw anything in it. Sure, the clothes were ill-fitting and mismatched, but that didn't necessarily mean stolen. _What the hell do stolen clothes look like anyway? _In any case, the only eyewitnesses to the incidents last night were the uniforms who'd been savagely beaten by the perpetrators and a homeless man who'd rambled drunkenly about lightning bolts.

"And that's not the best of it. Were you told the details?"

"Not really. I know that they paid cash to get in, bouncers didn't say they looked too unusual. They wandered around for a while and then, as far as we can tell, they just spontaneously drew and fired on each other."

"Yeah. They drew and fired on each other," Vukovich echoed. "Did you know what guns they were using, Ed?"

"No."

"12-gauge Mossbergs. Both of them had sawn-off barrels. Not a pretty sight, especially in a crowded space. And the crowning detail there is that they both used stolen police weapons to do it."

"Police? Oh -" Traxler bit off a curse. Vukovich chuckled bitterly. Forget the Phone Book Killer, the news circus was going to have a field day with this. He could already see the headlines; 'SNAFU AS KILLERS MURDER FOUR IN NIGHTCLUB. They stood together in companionable, glum silence for a while.

"Either of them have ID?" Traxler asked.

"Nope. No wallets, nothing. They weren't even carrying keys. Forensics are going to run some tests on them, but one of them took a 12-gauge to the face so I'm not holding out for dental identification for that one."

"Maybe they have prior convictions."

"That's a long shot. The only other identifying marks on them are barcode tattoos. Both of them have one on their right forearm. It could be some kind of gang tattoo, but honestly? Any gang members stupid enough to pull a stunt like this would've all been picked up years ago."

He rubbed his forehead pensively. There was a job to do, always another case, and sometimes it was one hell of a job. He took the pack out of his pocket and drew out a stick of Juicy Fruit gum. It was a bad habit of his, but it beat smoking by a long way. It was a coping mechanism, he supposed. _For the nights when the craziness in this world gets a little too crazy, even for an old cop like me_.

He stood there and chewed, watching as forensics packed up the corpses. That was strange too; the two men looked almost alike lying there on those stretchers. The height, the build, the facial structure... _They could've been twins_, he thought with a shudder.

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"It was bad, I mean, there was blood and people screaming. I thought I was going to die, Ginger. No, I _knew _I was gonna die."

Sarah choked. Ginger hugged her hard, whispered comforting nothings in her ear. Sarah knew she was cracking up. She didn't want to lose it. That felt too damn much like being the _stupid_ damsel in distress in a story. But she felt muzzy, dizzy and numb. She'd come that close... those people with guns. _God, they had guns_! She could have died. She closed her eyes, dry-scrubbed her face again. She felt a comforting hand patting her on the back.

"You'll be okay, kid. You're stronger than this."

_Thanks for the sentiment, Matt_. He really was a good guy, one of the best. Still, he hadn't been there, he hadn't seen it. Sarah had, and things were different Everything felt different now, raw even. The colours were brighter, more saturated. Sarah had honestly felt that she was going to die. Was she supposed to react like this? She hadn't been that near to the shooting**(.)** Was it post-traumatic stress disorder? Her dad had been like that, and Sarah didn't want to end up like him.

She heard the knock on the door and Matt's footsteps as he left to get it. The people in the nightclub - oh God. She didn't want to think about it. Think about them. How many people had that psycho killed? The screaming. She heard the door opening, Matt's voice and then - a sharp _crack_. The sound reverberated.

She froze up, muscles locked in place. She couldn't move. _Oh God, please, no, don't please don't not here Matt please pleasepleaseplease_. Ginger's mouth was open in a o of surprise. Sarah thought Ginger might have been screaming, but her own ears were ringing, deafened from the sound.

The psycho had missed her earlier, he was coming for her and now it was her fault that he was coming here and - Ginger was up on her feet and rushing towards the door. Even through her tears, Sarah could see someone standing in the doorway. A flash and Ginger stumbled and fell. No! _No no no please no no no 't -_

Even Sarah could hear the bass _boom_ as the gun went off again. She flinched, startled into action. She threw herself back and screamed. _Boom_. And again. Her voice was hoarse. Everything felt slow, like they were all trapped in honey and time was moving slowly, so slowly and why was she thinking of bears?

Sarah felt a hand slap her face, hard. She fell backwards, cheeks burning, as an arm pulled her up. The man was strong, his fingers felt like steel tendons digging into her arm. She almost fell, but he braced her up. She felt sick with horror. She blinked. The man was black, tall, with brown eyes. His mouth was moving, but Sarah couldn't follow what he was saying. He repeated himself, and she heard him for the first time.

"Come with me if you want to live," he said.

He dragged her after him, she couldn't process what he was saying and why was there a man lying in the doorway? The man was huge, muscled like a bodybuilder. He'd been shot in the back. As Sarah watched, the bodybuilder started to get up before the other man shot him again. And Ginger was just lying there, so still. Ginger could never keep still. It wasn't right that she wasn't moving. But the other man, the one with the shotgun, grabbed her and pushed her forwards.

She tripped over Matt's body in the doorway, eyes staring at her in blank accusation; _you brought it here, Sarah, we're dead now because of _y_ou_.The man dragged her on, kept going. She turned to look, and saw the other man getting up. Her brain was protesting; _he'd just been shot, people die when they're shot, why isn't he dead?_ It was a while before she realised that he was talking, when they were already out of the door and running towards a car.

She thought that he had been talking for a while now. She tried to concentrate on what he was saying, but the words didn't seem to make sense. She thought that he was hyperventilating. He shoved her into the passenger seat and got into the driver's himself. She wondered why she didn't just get out and run.

"- lost you earlier, when Reese bought it in that club. Thank God I tracked the metal here before it got to you. That's why Connor sent two of us back, in case something happened. He sent us back to keep you safe."

The car lurched forwards, screaming tyres and all. Her stomach lurched. The man didn't seem interested in driving safely, swerving between two cars with inches to spare. Horns blared from somewhere behind them.

"I'm Sumner by the way. He sent us back to protect you. Me and Reese, but he's not gonna check out. I saw them taking his body out. He was a good guy."

The words made no sense, no sense at all. Sarah didn't know why she listened to him, why she didn't scream and jump out of the car. She just sat there and listened. The man, Sumner, had kind eyes. Kind brown eyes, even as he babbled about things that made no sense. She did catch one thing though; he knew one of the men in the nightclub.

"The other man. The one who killed your friend," she said, hesitantly. "They looked the same. I think he's dead too."

Sumner looked at her and Sarah almost shrank back from the hard look in the man's eyes. "Looked the same? Dead? Are you sure? _Are you sure_?" The last phrase came out in a hiss.

She squeaked out a "yes."

"Fuck. I'm not Sci-Tech, I don't pretend to understand what happens when we come back, but... fuck. It could be, but ... damn it! Maybe the machines got their hands on him at some point, couldn't be too hard to arrange, he was in Century, but surely? No, that's too much of a coincidence. Couldn't be. Would be a damn ironic to put on your gravestone."

Sumner muttered something she couldn't catch under his breath. He didn't mention his friend again. He carried on talking, some of it made sense, some of it didn't. But that name, Reese. She felt like it should've been _important_ somehow.

That was the weird thing.

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**Author's Notes: **A story idea from **JMHthe3rd**, coming from one of our debates about the nature of time travel. We were arguing about how time travel works and he used an example of multiple Kyles being sent back from the same divergent future. That was too good an idea not to run with it. Thanks to **JMHthe3rd** and **TermFan1980** for beta-reading this.

In Automatic for the People, Riley dates November 16 as a day after the beginning of the episode, which is a day after Samson & Delilah. John's birthday is therefore November the 14th. The date of his conception must be around nine months previous in the winter of 1982 or the spring of 1983. The Terminator was set on May 12, so I co-opted the date as February 12th.

In this storyline, the T-800, for whatever reason, is delayed in checking out Sarah's apartment and therefore doesn't kill Ginger and Matt earlier and doesn't know that she went to the Tech-Noir. Pity no-one told either Kyle Reeses that...

This story uses the characters from the shooting script for The Terminator rather than the finished version. Therefore, there are a few changes, such as John sending Sumner back with Kyle and the identities of the cops. From the original script:

DETECTIVE SGT. TRAXLER. Traxler is black, lean and very jaded. LIEUTENANT ED VUKOVICH, Homicide Division [...] square and solid, a human bulldog gone a little to paunch. He chews Juicy Fruit gum like a maniac: a chain-chewer. He's homely as an old boot. And he's not a smart cop, he's a wise one; rarer still.


	3. Built Day

**Chapter Three: **Built Day

**Summary: **It's a rather unconventional family celebration.

**Word Count: **4634

**Rating: **T

**Disclaimer: **If I owned Terminator, I would be on a beach somewhere, not looking for a job.

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**BUILT DAY**

"You haven't spoken for twenty-eight minutes," Cameron said, interrupting John's close inspection of a diorama of two dinosaurs. It was a very Cameron thing to say. Nothing that any of them had said had stopped her from talking that way, even though they had all pointed out that humans don't have in-built digital timers. Cameron merely thanked them for explaining and continued to do it.

John was beginning to think that Cameron was developing some strange machine version of a mannerism. Maybe it was like how people squint when they concentrate or fiddle with their hands when they're nervous. Maybe Cameron just felt compelled to tell the time accurately. John couldn't tell, and that was one of the things that he liked most about Cameron. She was different. She was _unpredictable_.

"Well, it's nothing." Cameron offered no reply. John imagined expressive, fake brown eyes boring into the back of his neck. _Terminators don't need to blink_. He turned around. "All right. My birthday's tomorrow. Okay? I know that Mom totally forgot."

"Birthday?" That drew a complete blank. John almost gaped in disbelief. Jeez, what sort of super-advanced robot from the future was she?

"You don't know what a birthday is?"

"It's the day you were born."

"Pretty memorable for a mother, right?"

"But it was 16 years ago."

"A birthday's like a holiday. Once a year, every year, people just kinda celebrate you, I guess." Cameron stood still, no change in expression, with her head tilted off to one side. Christ, she _really_ didn't get it. John had a sudden vision of the future: no need for dogs or fancy metal detectors to weed out the invading killer robots, just ask everyone why your birthday was important. "And you get presents, eat cake, and it's fun. It's supposed to be. Last year Mom got me a flak jacket."

"That's a tight present."

"No, it's not." He rolled his eyes. Cameron would approve, of course. _Protect John Connor _was kinda her goal in life. John turned and began to walk away. Cameron followed.

"Whatever, I don't know why I care. I've been driving since I was twelve and technically this is my twenty-fourth birthday. It's just I time travelled over eight of them."

"Do I have a birthday?"

He faced her again. It was sometimes hard to remember that Cameron was a terminator and not a child. _Sure, a psychopathic child with dead-pan aim and a quick trigger finger. _She was quirky, curious. He put a small half-smile on his face. "I don't know. Were you born?"

She hesitated. Then, almost tentatively: "I was built."

John grasped for something to say.

"Well then maybe you have like a built day."

Christ, that was cheesy. Cameron looked down reflectively. _Can terminators be introspective and self-contemplative? _John was about to ask her something when Morris walked over, attracting their attention.

* * *

**Some months later...**

Cameron Baum was patrolling. When she wasn't shadowing John Connor, Cameron made a sweep of the house and neighbourhood every few hours via a randomised route. If a law enforcement officer became suspicious (which was statistically unlikely with an average Caucasian female teen) and stopped and searched her, they would have found a Glock 17C nine-millimetre pistol tucked into the waistband of her jeans. Cameron would have preferred a heavier weapons actually capable of damaging another endoskeleton, but her recommendation had been vetoed for the sake of stealth. On those grounds, the Benelli M2 shotgun, Colt M4 Carbine and Derek's beloved Barrett M82 anti-material rifle had all been forbidden.

Cameron made a right turn onto another quiet suburban street. She stopped for a second, sweeping her eyes left and right. _Scanning... _There were children playing, a harassed-looking commuter driving down the road in a beaten-down Ford and an old man mowing the lawn; none of them were hostile terminators clad in infiltration sheaths. As befitted a superior predator with the power to crush a human skull with a single blow, she ignored them completely.

She arrived back at the Connor residence at 1021 hours. John was upstairs. School was too dangerous - Cromartie had proved that - and with a small amount of persuasion Sarah had pulled John out of school on the pretence that he and Cameron were being home-schooled.

Cameron found John at his desk, absorbed in a computer science book. She approved; John had to learn everything he could about computers; a basic tenet of strategy was 'understand your enemy' and despite it's sophistication SKYNET was still fundamentally a man-made AI. She observed that his chair was tilting backwards at a dangerous angle. She ran a simulation to project the possibility of John breaking his neck. _Threat Level: Minimal_.

As she walked up, John looked over his shoulder. "Any scary robots sneaking up through the backyard?"

"No. There are no terminators within a half-kilometre radius of this house." He didn't reply, returning to his book as she stood behind his chair, at his elbow. In the future of 2027, Cameron had often stood behind General Connor, as he issued orders to the commanders of the global Resistance against SKYNET.

The parameters of her mission had changed. At Sarah's request, Cameron had taken the Connors eight years into the future to fight and destroy SKYNET before it could be created. They had shifted from a defensive stance to an aggressive one. Would this John eventually become the future John Connor that she had known? Future John had told her that his mother would have died of cancer. Did Cameron change that future, or had he been told by a previous Cameron? Had she accidentally changed the future - changed John Connor?

The survivors of J-Day who made up the older generation of the Resistance wouldn't easily accept a younger man as their leader. The eight years he'd lost could have been vital for him. If that was the case, Cameron would find another time displacement device and they could travel back, giving John eight more years to mature and become the leader he needed to be.

John turned around to look up at her, watching her study him. They made eye contact. After a few moments he sighed and put the book down, folding a corner to mark the page.

"You know, I've told you before," he started. She already knew what he was going to say. "Don't stand over me like that. It's ..."

"Freaky," she finished for him.

"Yeah. It's freaky when you do that. Mum used to do that all the time. Stand over me. She even used to watch me sleep."

"You're not asleep."

John didn't grace her observation with a response. She had offended him.

"I'm sorry for being a freak," she said, softly. He didn't reply. Cameron didn't move. They held the frozen tableau for four point two seconds. After a moment, John ran his fingers through his hair. He seemed to have come to some decision.

"Look, I've gotta get back to this book. If you've got nothing better to do than watch me, can you ...?" He left the question unasked, but jerked a finger at the bathroom. She picked up the plastic basket, overflowing with dirty laundry. John wished to delegate his chores to her yet again. She accepted the burden stoically. "Well, happy birthday," he said, grinning.

Cameron frowned. She wasn't aware that a basket full of dirty laundry or the chore of washing them was an acceptable birthday gift. On the other hand, Cameron was well aware that her knowledge of human popular culture in the decade preceding the start of the war was woefully incomplete.

"How did you know when I was constructed? I was not born. I was built. You should say 'happy built day'." Last time he had been very clear on that point.

"Huh? What?" John seemed taken aback. That was odd, he had appeared to be aware that it was the anniversary date of her construction. "You mean it actually is your built day?"

"Yes. You wished me happy built day. Is it a human custom to wish-"

"No, no, no! Never mind. It's a (he paused, she looked at him) ... it's a human thing, okay?"

"Okay. It's a human thing," Cameron smiled a pre-programmed smile at him. After a few moments, he returned to his book and started reading again. She recognised that this was a time when John wanted to be alone and left. Even in the future, there were many times when General Connor had needed to be alone and Cameron still hadn't discovered why. She had stood over his bed and guarded him from his enemies, human and machine, for six months. She'd constructed as complete a psychological profile and dossier of the general's past and present as anyone could manage and yet she'd somehow managed to miss the man. She still didn't know him.

* * *

John Connor, leader of the Resistance, amazing terminator-hacking genius and all around good guy was leaning back in his chair. Yep, he liked to live dangerously. One had to when at any time evil assassin-robots from the future could call at the front door. That was why there was a shotgun in the umbrella stand. _Wonder what the Jehovah's Witnesses think of that?_

Cameron was gone, which was probably a good thing. He couldn't concentrate on the cryptology manual and talk to Cameron at the same time. Not that he ever had a normal conversation with Cameron anyway. He'd spit out some off-hand comment and then spend the next half an hour explaining the precise meaning and etymology of the word. So ... cryptology. It was pretty deep stuff, with some pretty complicated mathematics and a helluva lot of theory. He wondered whether future John just made his terminator bodyguards do all the maths too.

But then, he'd need terminators to do the cryptology to hack the terminators who'd do the cryptology. It would be like a chicken and egg situation, except that one John had definitely done the math sometime in the past and hacked the first terminator and here Cameron was. Besides, they'd gotten into Vick's chip fine.

Minutes passed. He read the same page three times without actually taking any of it in.

"John."

"Derek." Derek was the very picture of the veteran Resistance fighter. Permanent three-day stubble, grizzled and handsome - almost the quintessential war hero from every Hollywood movie. John had to ask him how he kept that effect someday, although it would be a while before John was shaving regularly.

"What's that there?"

John tilted the book cover at him, let Derek read it.

"Computers," Derek said. The distaste was evident in his tone, but then Derek probably wouldn't go near the coffee maker if he could help it. God knows what he would do if he was actually forced to operate a laptop computer. It didn't bode too well for the rebuilding of society after the war, provided that John won, of course.

"Yeah. Where've you been?" John asked.

"Around," Derek said non-committally. John didn't really notice the evasive answer; his mind was still on Cameron. In moments of boredom, he often wondered about the terminator and what she was to him in the future. Was she a confidante, one of his lieutenants (he doubted that, if Derek was anything like a representative sample), a bodyguard, his friend? Anyway, he was pretty sure that he wasn't _involved _with her, because that would require some rather unfortunate implications and besides, he'd need brain bleach to deal with those mental images. _That or a pack of tissues, pervert_, hissed his inner Resistance fighter.

He was fairly sure it was physically possible - Barbara Chamberlain had been fooled - but it would be pretty one-sided. John still wasn't sure if Cameron actually understood the concept of love beyond its dictionary definition. Besides, it'd probably make her _inefficient_. Ha!

"I was looking into Dakara Systems, if you have to know," Derek said, bringing John's train of thought to a crashing halt. He'd mistaken John's silence for a demand for more information.

"Right. Why shouldn't I need to know? Am I or am I not John Connor?"

"Well. It's just ... you know. Your mom. Sarah. Those three dots. Thought I might have a look into Dakara myself, seeing as how she's been a little obsessive."

"Well?" _Let's just overlook the fact that you just straight-up implied that Mom's crazy._

"Nothing. They're just a start-up without a chance in hell of getting the Air Force contract. It's a dead end."

John nodded neutrally; he didn't really care that Derek thought his mother had lost it - he was beginning to suspect the same thing. Of course, Derek's survival instinct was strong enough that he wouldn't actually point out her three-dots craze just in case she went off the deep end. His uncle took John's nod as the cue to walk off to the kitchen, probably to fetch his first beer of the day. John tried to concentrate on his book again.

He finally abandoned his effort after catching himself re-reading the same paragraph yet another time. He put the book down and let his thoughts drift. _One good thing to say for school, at least you're never bored out of your head_. It was a sunny day and the warm rays of light filtered in through the windows. He smiled. Even if they were boring now, he suspected that in the coming years, assuming they didn't stop Skynet, he would _really_ miss the quiet moments when he wasn't being constantly pursued by terminators.

Terminators. Cameron. His thoughts went to Cameron again. She was quite possibly the most childlike advanced killing machine that he'd ever met. _Not that I've met many of them, just Cameron and good ol' Uncle Bob_. Uncle Bob had behaved strangely too, after they'd flipped his chip to read-write mode. John had cried after his death, he'd still been young enough to cry over a machine then. Rather pathetically, Uncle Bob had been a father figure to him, the only one before Charley.

But even so, Cameron was different from the T-800. She had an odd sort of innocent curiosity to her which John found utterly fascinating. She was a _real_ intelligence, not an artificial one, growing and developing likes and dislikes - like that stupid purple jacket and Riley - and yet she completely missed the point of some concepts. Concepts like love, or mercy or ... or birthdays. Except she kind of had. She had asked him whether she had a birthday. He'd goofed off, telling her that she had a built day.

And then, John Connor had an epiphany,

* * *

"Cameron?"

John popped his head around the door. He had a query. Cameron shifted her attention away from the spinning appliance and looked John in the eyes.

"Yes?"

"Is today your built day?"

"Yes."

"Err, right..." He seemed flustered as he ascended the stairs. It probably wasn't important. Cameron went back to watching the washing machine. The white clothes still had an hour left, followed by the coloured clothes. It was important not to mix the two, otherwise the colours would run.

* * *

"Mom?"

"Hey."

"Can I ask you for a favour?"

"Sure, what is it?"

* * *

The white clothes were almost dry. On the rack Cameron arranged the new batch of coloureds into the most efficient configuration possible. Even though the job was beneath the level of an advanced humanoid hunter-killer, she completed it far quicker and more efficiently than any human could. As she ascended the stairs, Cameron realised that something was wrong.

The house was far too quiet. She frowned. While downstairs, she had heard the car leaving. They seemed to be taking too long for a simple resupply trip. Cameron frowned. They could have left on a mission without informing her again. John could be in danger. It was irresponsible of Sarah not to take Cameron with them, even if it was just a simple reconnaissance.

The car was in the drive. She relaxed, powering back down to standard operational levels. There was no present threat, Sarah would've required Cameron's assistance if John had been injured, and Cameron was sure that she would've heard their perimeter being breached.

She entered the lounge and encountered a startling sight. It took her central processing unit sixty cycles to fully analyse the situation. For a human, it would have been the equivalent of standing with her jaw agape. Terminators couldn't really be surprised, but within the bounds of her programming Cameron had encountered a totally new situation.

If what she was seeing wasn't the result of an inexplicable visual anomaly, a ghost in the machine, then the aggravated damage to her chip must have been severe. Cameron clung to the hope that there is something wrong with the optical sensors.

"Happy built day, Cameron."

She frowned. Does not compute. She must be malfunctioning.

* * *

John had originally thought it was a good idea, maybe even a very clever idea.. However, now the spur of the moment had passed he was pretty sure that it was one of the worst ideas he had come up with. His mom was standing with a forced neutral expression on her face while Derek opted for a scowl which clearly stated that he was not responsible in any way, shape or form. Cameron stood facing them with an unreadable expression on her artificial face.

John tried to think of something witty to say. _This is going to be awkward_. John hadn't ever really been great at breaking the ice but he reckoned that even the most suave socialite wouldn't have been able to figure out the appropriate response. John swore that he could _feel_ Derek smirk behind him. _Told you, John_, that imaginary smirk seemed to say. He had to say something! He opened his mouth and croaked the only thing he could think of.

"Happy built day, Cameron."

That was rather lame. Cameron was still regarding him with evident puzzlement, her brows furrowed and her head to one side in the way that she adopted whenever she was analysing something. She straightened up and John could've sworn that he saw a small smile. Her cheek dimpled and John relaxed slightly.

"Thank you, John," she deadpanned.

"We bought a cake..." Sarah made an abortive gesture towards the shopping bag. Her voice trailed off as Cameron stood stock-still, as if she was waiting for a cue.. John couldn't quantify the feeling that he had; he wasn't a machine which could analyse itself. He just felt that the whole situation was pretty damn surreal

John moved forwards and helped Cameron unwrap the cake as Sarah choked out niceties from between her teeth. It was a small cake, seeing as how the whole built day thing was more of a grand gesture than anything else. _Come to think about it, what does Cameron actually do with the food?_ Did she just hold it in storage and barf it out later? If they found cake clogging up the toilet, she would be the one cleaning it up this time. John fished around in the bag, finding the candles.

"Grow up fast, don't they?" _Shut up, Derek_, he thought desperately. Derek had relaxed imperceptibly, deigning to hurl sarcastic comments at the others as they stood in a little circle around the cake. John knew that the whole thing was a fake, a stupid mockery of a birthday. _I just wanted to do something nice!_ There were probably more words to describe the disaster in Cameron's _Skynet Compact English Dictionary_ or something.

"Make a wish," ordered the mother of the house. John couldn't stand it any more.

"Stop." Sarah turned, confused. Cameron stilled, turning only her head to look at him. John thought of _The Exorcist_ and the image made her seem even more inhuman. It reinforced his sense of wrongness in the situation and he began to understand. Cos' she wasn't Cameron Baum, average teenage girl, she was Cameron, kick-ass terminator from an apocalyptic future. "Wait just a sec."

"John?" Cameron had furrowed her brows again, confused by his sudden change of tack. Derek had stood up, interested again in the situation. Mom shot a dirty look at Derek and he subsided. Yeah, even if she agreed with Derek, she'd support John just to be a good mom.

"Cameron, do you understand what a birthday is? Do you understand what a birthday means to a person?"

"I don't know. I'll have to think about it."

The candles burned down, the wax running and pooling into the bottom of the candle. John watched it overflow onto the surface of the cake. They all seemed trapped in a diorama, watching Cameron as the machine stared into the flames. _A mother, a saviour and a soldier at a terminator's birthday_. _Retail price $39.99_.

It was Derek who finally broke the silence: "Cameron? You know that after you've made a wish, you blow the candles out?"

"Oh. Thank you for explaining," she said. Cameron blew out the candles. The cake, when they scraped off the wax, was rich and delicious. John had two slices.

* * *

Cameron sat in her room. They called it her bedroom but she didn't sleep in it; terminators didn't need to sleep. Cameron did not have the possessions of a teenage girl. Her clothes were in the wardrobe and her weapons were in the makeshift armoury that Sarah kept. It felt empty, unused, a human affectation. It was Cameron Baum's room and it belonged to her cover identity.

At this time of a normal night, Cameron would be normally be out patrolling or visiting Eric in his library. Tonight was different. Tonight was the anniversary of her construction, and built days were important. It was a celebration of herself. She had analysed her own existence and tried to find something to celebrate. It was difficult, she couldn't be happy as humans understood the term. The custom of a wish was illogical, but she honoured it anyway. Her wish had also been illogical.

She frowned at her presents. They had no intrinsic value to her terminator mind, a machine that was designed to kill as efficiently as possible. But they were hers and John had said that _it's the thought that counts_ which also felt illogical, but Cameron accepted it as a good reason anyway. Besides, those presents were _hers_. Cameron didn't actually own many things.

She picked up John's present to her. It was a mechanical watch. He had made an off-hand joke about her ability to always tell the time. She'd informed him that her internal timekeeping mechanism was a caesium atomic clock, far more accurate and precise than the hunter-case fob watch that he had given her. It was useless to a terminator, but it was John's present to her. Maybe it could come in useful at some point in the future, for some unknown purpose. She would keep it and appreciate it, if it kept John happy.

Cameron studied her second present, the one from Sarah. It was a book, probably from that small second-hand bookshop on the corner. Her optical sensors could detect the faint traces left by many fingerprints on it's well worn and faded covers. It was a Spanish translation of _The Wonderful Wizard of Oz_ by L. Frank Baum. She had committed every word of the manuscript to memory already. In her past and his future, John had liked listening to her reading it to him. He said that it had conjured up memories of his distant childhood. It was strange that this John strained to break away from maternal control while his future self longed to see her just one more time, but she had learned a long time ago that humans were very strange animals. Cameron flicked through the pages of the book. She could scan and read each page at a hundred times the speed of a human but she forced herself to read slowly. There was no one around to see, but it was good practice for infiltrators to mimic human habits during the course of their missions.

Cameron eventually closed the book and stood up. It was time for her nightly patrol. She retrieved the Benelli shotgun and checked it. All the shells contained solid depleted uranium rounds - home-made but still effective - as buckshot was useless against anything more dangerous than a Series 400 terminator. Cameron noticed a small, innocuous item lying on the doormat as she made her customary round. She picked it up warily while her sensors attempted to detect any scent which would betray the presence of weaponized chemicals or explosives. Detecting nothing, she opened the package. It was a small CD sleeve with a legend in orange. The words read:

_Chopin - Preludes & Nocturnes_

* * *

Derek Reese awoke instantly as he heard the sound of a flat emotionless voice.

"Why?" His first action was to jump for his Beretta, but if the metal actually wanted to kill him then he was as good as dead no matter what. There had been a time when Derek had woken with a hand on his gun as soon as anyone so much as entered the room. It was another few seconds before he realised that he was in 2007, the house wasn't under attack and that the terminator was Cameron.

"What the fuck are you doing?" he hissed. The machine didn't even have the grace to lurk hurt. No, it looked curious and confused. Maybe even anxious. His hand itched, drifting slowly towards his piece.

"Why?" it asked again. Its voice was calm, flat and non-inflected. Robotic. "You don't like me."

It was the middle of the fucking night and Derek had already felt tired. He didn't need this copy of Allie standing there in front of him, looking just like she did whenever the General did something inscrutable and she was trying to figure him out. It probably looked like her down to the atomic level and it was late and he was fucking tired and he really didn't care. He said the first thing that came to mind.

"I don't remember _her_ birthday any more," he said. That got through its rusty circuits, and Cameron was smart enough not to ask who _she_ was. He was ever so tired.

* * *

"Hello, John."

"Huh? Cameron? What the-?" He was barely coherent. It was too late for this. John sat up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes in the sudden glare of the light. It was bright, blindingly so. He sighed. It had been a good dream, even if he couldn't recall anything more than a fleeting image now. Good dreams were hard to come by when you were in the business of preventing an apocalypse. "Cameron, what the hell are you doing in my room in the middle of the night? No, scratch that. Just turn the fucking light off."

She didn't. "Why did you do it?"

"Do what?"

"Give me a birthday party. The cake. The presents."

"Cameron. Can't we talk in the morning?"

"Yes."

"Thank you for the watch. It was a tight present."

"Mmm, sure. Now can I go to sleep?"

"Yes. Thank you, John." A beat. The light went off. "Sweet dreams."

* * *

**Author's Notes: **Set Mid-Season 2. No explicit pairings, although there's hints of Derek/Allison and John/Cameron. Thanks to **JMHthe3rd** for beta-reading my work, as always. This story is a rewrite of two of my earlier one-shots, _Happy Built Day_ and _Presents_. Rewriting it was kinda embarrassing because I was such a bad writer at the time.


End file.
